Africa: The Human Race Started in Africa

Kampala — PRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni on July 2 addressed the 9th Ordinary Session of the African Union Summit in Accra, Ghana, which discussed a proposal by Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gadhafi to create a United States of Africa.

The President noted that, "Africa is both the cradle of man and of civilisation.

Archaeology is continuing to confirm that for five million years or more, all human beings were Africans and were living only in Africa. According to John Reader's book, The Biography of Africa, it is only since 100,000 years ago that groups of human beings started leaving Africa to populate other continents."

I agree with President Museveni. On March 23, 1986, The San Francisco Chronicle published a story titled, "Mother of us All". The story showed a black woman from East Africa, nicknamed Mitochondria Eve, as the mother of the entire human race.

On May 11, 1986, Newsweek magazine published a story of a Blackman eating a fruit from a Black woman. It was titled: "The African Eve". In January 26, 1987, Time Magazine had another photograph of a Black woman with a headline, "Our Genealogical mother from Africa". All the other Euro-American magazines, The Economist, Philadelphia, Science News, Organic, Inquirer, Natural History, Nature, BJS and recently The New York Times book of the month, wrote about the subject.

President Museveni has joined a concerted Pan African "Know Your Origin" plan, championed by myself in the last 20 years, aimed at explaining to Africans who were the first people to populate the world.

The question of the origin of races and the colour of the Egyptians was also asked by UNESCO at a major international conference in Cairo in 1974. It was correctly answered by the African Prof Cheik Anta Diop and his colleague Prof Theophile Obenga. As a result of their answers, UNESCO had to rewrite the history of Africa with the "General History of Africa Project".

Newsweek and The San Francisco Chronicle were reporting detailed independent studies that had been carried out by molecular biologists at Barkley University in California and Emory University in Atlanta. The researchers looked at molecular biology to explain the origin of humanity.

Molecular biologists concentrated on nuclear DNA, inherited from the father and the mother. You have two segments that sit on your chromosomes. However, there is another type of DNA known as Mitochondria which is DNA (mtDNA) inherited only from the mother. Scientists at Berkeley in California examined Mitochondrial DNAs from 147 people, drawn from five geographic populations. The analysis was based on restriction mapping. All these mitochondrial DNAs were found to stem from one woman who lived about 200,000 years ago, in Africa.

All the populations examined, except the African population, had multiple origins, implying that each area was colonised repeatedly, apart from Africa. The tag of "African Eve" is misleading for the woman in question was not one woman, but probably a black population of what could have been 100,000 people. Mitocondria answered conclusively the question of who was our mother and suggested that movements of African modern man to populate the rest of the world happened between 80,000 - 1500,000 years. This was in line with the discovery of the fossil of the oldest homo sapiens from Omo Valley at the border with Ethiopia and Kenya, which was carbon dated by Oxford University 130,000 years ago.

According to Cheik Anta Diop, the Pharaoh of African antiquity, the African left the Great Lakes (particularly the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon) to populate the rest of the world following the Nile via the Erasmus of Suez and present day Gibraltar. The African was in Europe 40,000 years before any other homo sapiens.

The original Black European, known as Gramaldi, would remain in Europe from 20,000 years, until the glaciation period of 20,000 years ago and mutate into the European Cro-Magnon, the progenitor of the white race.

The remains of the African Gramaldi are now in the museum of Monaco near the town of Monte Carlo. The Mitochondria DNA tell us who was our mother, but what about our father? Could our father have been white or red or yellow and could the father have come from anywhere else other than Africa?

A father of humanity being other than Black, would violet many natural laws, mainly Gloger's law. Gloger's law states that mankind or species born in the tropics are necessarily pigmented where the body will produce a dark pigmentation known as melanin. As you move away from the equator, the body begins to drop the melanin shield and becomes light.

The contention would also violate Mendel law. Mendel, the father of genetics, stated that Black genes were dominant and White genes were recessive and that a recessive cannot produce a dominant, meaning if you had began with White people, you would not have got Black people.

In 2004, IBM and National Geographic carried out a genealogical project looking at the Y chromosome. This is the gene fathers pass directly to the child. By looking at who your grandfather was and who was their grandfather, you would eventually arrive at the father of us all, who is nicknamed genetic Adam.

After many years, the genes begin to make mistakes, they mutate and these mutations are stored in the genetic blueprint in the nuclei of the cell. They are known as genetic markers. Therefore, It follows that the oldest race is also the race with the highest level of genetic markers.

The IBM/National Geographic project led them to the Island of Pate off the Cost of Kenya, where they found the source of all genes, but one man did not fit the criteria.

They then moved further to the interior of Africa where they found the oldest people on earth called the Hazabe, who live near Lake Tanganyika. They have the original Y chromosome. The scientific Adam was compared to the Hazabe chief and their language considered the oldest.

Therefore, according to molecular biology and archaeology, humanity started in Africa. According to the Bible in the Book of Genesis, the dimensions of the Garden of Eden are given as the Tigris and Euphrates in the North, the Zambezi in the South and the Nile in the East. This is the same dimensions as the Great Rift Valley that starts from the Trans-Jordan to Mozambique.

The writer is a classical historian, writer, lecturer and broadcaster.

AllAfrica publishes around 2,000 reports a day from more than 130 news organizations and over 200 other institutions and individuals, representing a diversity of positions on every topic. We publish news and views ranging from vigorous opponents of governments to government publications and spokespersons. Publishers named above each report are responsible for their own content, which AllAfrica does not have the legal right to edit or correct.

Related

Follow AllAfrica

AllAfrica is a voice of, by and about Africa - aggregating, producing and distributing 2000 news and information items daily from over 130 African news organizations and our own reporters to an African and global public. We operate from Cape Town, Dakar, Lagos, Monrovia, Nairobi and Washington DC.